As look carefully around us for the strings, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that Pravda excoriated Western art as degenerate and bourgeois. Days before, at an exhibiton at the Manege in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had attacked the Modernist paintings of Pavel Kuznetsov and Robert Falk, pronouncing them “dog sh*t.” Khrushchev was so revolted by an Ernst Neizvestny sculpture– an Expressionist female nude– that he called the artist a “fag” to his face, then added, “We give ten years for that.” Undaunted, Neizvetny insisted that the gallery bring him a girl so he could set the dictator straight.

As we smell the popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1889 that Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London. Young Charles toured the U.S. in 1910 and 1912 with the Fred Karno troupe of vaudevillians, rooming with fellow performer Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who later became known as Stan Laurel. Jackson returned to England (later to return); Chaplin stayed… and became, of course, the most famous motion picture performer of his time, one of the most successful writer-producer-directors of the era, and one of its biggest entertainment moguls (having co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford).